President Trump and Sean Hannity's dumb and dumber North Korea interview

“By all accounts, this summit went extremely well,” said Sean Hannity on Tuesday night, and by “all accounts” he meant exactly one account — President Trump’s — and it is an account in which there is no reason to place much faith. Trump’s big meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un occurred one on one, plus two translators who aren’t talking. Neither is Kim Jong Un. This leaves us with the word of the president, who told Hannity in an exclusive Fox News interview that he and the dictator “had a very good feel right from the beginning.” What does Trump mean by a “good feel”? Who knows. What was clear was Trump’s affection for a man responsible for a dictatorial regime and many deaths in his own country: “He’s got a very good personality, he’s funny and he’s very, very smart. He’s a great negotiator; he’s a very strategic kind of a guy.” Sounds like love at first sight.

Which also describes the relationship between Trump and Hannity. Always less a newsman than a cheerleader, Hannity was buying everything the salesman in chief was peddling. “We talked about his country has to be de-nuked and he didn’t fight it — he fully understood,” said Trump about the North Korean leader, and Hannity didn’t even blink at our president’s mangled English. Always eager to revise history in Trump’s favor, Hannity brought up Trump’s early, “heated rhetoric” toward Kim Jong Un — the “Little Rocket Man” and my-button-is-bigger-than-yours hogwash — casting it as wisdom in retrospect. “Without the rhetoric, we wouldn’t be here,” said Trump. “I hated to do it. Sometimes I felt foolish doing it.” This is the only remarkable thing Trump said — he never admits to feeling foolish. But Hannity was too busy fawning to note this.

He was also doing some curious self-promotion that backfired. Hannity said at the start that he had tagged along with all the other members of the media on this trip to Singapore, and offered this odd boast, saying that during Trump’s post-summit press conference, “I got to sit in the second row!” Then he added bitterly, “Fake news CNN Jim Acosta was four seats down.” So if CNN’s guy was a few seats away, you didn’t have an extra-special seat, did you, Sean? Awww. No matter; Hannity wrapped up his pep talk with The Great Miscommunicator (“I think absolutely [Kim Jong Un] will be coming to the White House. … His people — you see their fervor, they have a great fervor”) and got back to business as usual: squawking about how the rest of the news media has spent too much time covering … Stormy Daniels. I know; it makes no sense. Doesn’t matter — it’s Hannity.